Ever since the introduction of the microprocessor, computer systems have been getting faster and faster. In approximate accordance with Moore's law (based on Intel® Corporation co-founder Gordon Moore's 1965 publication predicting the number of transistors on integrated circuits to double every two years), the speed increase has shot upward at a fairly even rate for nearly three decades. At the same time, the size of both memory and non-volatile storage has also steadily increased, such that many of today's personal computers are more powerful than supercomputers from just 10-15 years ago. In addition, the speed of network communications has likewise seen astronomical increases.
Increases in processor speeds, memory, storage, and network bandwidth technologies have resulted in the build-out and deployment of networks with ever increasing capacities. More recently, the introduction of cloud-based services, such as those provided by Amazon (e.g., Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3)) and Microsoft (e.g., Azure and Office 365) has resulted in additional network build-out for public network infrastructure, in addition to the deployment of massive data centers to support these services that employ private network infrastructure.
Cloud-based services are typically facilitated by a large number of interconnected high-speed servers, with host facilities commonly referred to as server “farms” or data centers. These server farms and data centers typically comprise a large-to-massive array of rack and/or blade servers housed in specially-designed facilities. Many of the larger cloud-based services are hosted via multiple data centers that are distributed across a geographical area, or even globally. For example, Microsoft Azure has multiple very large data centers in each of the United States, Europe, and Asia. Amazon employs co-located and separate data centers for hosting its EC2 and AWS services, including over a dozen AWS data centers in the US alone.
In order for the various server blades and modules to communicate with one another and to data storage, an extensive amount of cabling is used. Installing the cabling is very time-consuming and prone to error. In addition, the cost of the cables and connectors themselves are significant. For example, a 3-foot SAS (Serial attached SCSI) cable may cost $45 alone. Multiply this by thousands of cables and installations, and the costs add up quickly, as does the likelihood of cabling errors.